World Create Day

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For this year’s Hackaday Prize, we started an amazing experiment. World Create Day organized hundreds of hackerspaces around the world to come together and Build Hope for the future. This was an experiment to bring community shops and workspaces together to prototype their entries for the Hackaday Prize, and boy was it a success. We had hackerspaces from Portland to Pakistan taking part, and these are just a few of the amazing hacks they pulled off.

Students In Canada Repairing LipSyncs!

The theme of this year’s Hackaday Prize is to Build Hope, and students in Burnaby, British Columbia worked on some very cool projects that did just that. They created custom video game controllers, prototyped a few exoskeleton arms, and repaired LipSyncs. A LipSync is a mouth-operated joystick that allows a person to control a cursor on a computer with a minimum amount of head and neck movement. The idea behind the LipSync is to give wheelchair-bound people access to computers. This is important because an estimated one million people in Canada and the United States have limited or no use of their arms, rendering touchscreens inoperable.

The LipSync was an entry into the 2016 Hackaday Prize, and while it didn’t win the grand prize, it did bring a device that usually costs $3,000 down to about $300. That’s an order of magnitude of cost reduction that Builds Hope for the future. It’s amazing!

Raspberry Pis and Tschunk Slushies!

You might think that mixing alcohol and electronics might be dangerous, but not the people of kraut space, the hackerspace in Jena, Germany. For their World Create Day adventures, they made Tschunk Slushies! What is Tschunk? It’s rum and Club Mate, the definitive hacker drink! You might even say the addition of ethanol made it even more of a hacker drink. Ha ha.

While the Tschunk Slushies were mixing up, the team at the Jena Hackerspace set to work on their World Create Day project, an interface that logs their electricity usage. In reality this is just a photosensor taped to their power meter, but they’ve hooked everything up to a Raspberry Pi, giving them the ability to monitor electricity consumption over the Internet. That’s amazing. Governments and utility companies have spent billions of dollars developing ‘smart’ electricity meters, but a few ‘hackers’ have created their own in just hours! It’s almost as if that ‘hacker’ title isn’t bad at all, and being a ‘hacker’ is a good thing!

Making Laser Cutters Safe And Soldering Keychains

You’ll shoot your eye out, kid! Or at least you stand a decent chance of suffering irreversible eye damage if you’re running a laser cutter with the lid open. And for some reason, most of the cheap laser cutters out there come without safety interlocks if you can believe it. For his World Create Day Project, [RoboterFreak] made a laser cutter more secure. By putting a relay, microswitch, and Arduino in line with the laser tube, you can safely modify an off-the-shelf laser cutter to be vastly safer.

It’s not much, but it goes a long way toward making a laser cutter safe. With the simple addition of a switch, this laser cutter is now a machine that can be used within a quarter mile of children. This is something simple that you should do at your own hackerspace.

But World Create Day and the Hackaday Prize isn’t only about fretting over safety concerns. The folks at Thimble.io had fun soldering their own keychain flashlight. This is an awesome way to learn how to solder and hardware development. That’s exactly what we’re looking for in this year’s Hackaday Prize, by the way. We want people who will Build Hardware to Change The World.

The Hackaday Prize is running until November, and there’s still plenty of time to get your entry in. It doesn’t even have to be related to World Create Day, the most amazing virtual congregation of hackerspaces the world has ever seen. You can start your entry for the Hackaday Prize right here, build a project that will Build Hope, and be in the running to win tens of thousands of dollars. It’s an amazing contest, and we couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing online community.

On Saturday we saw a flood of interesting hacks come to life as more than 100 community organized meetups were held for World Create Day. Thank you to all of the organizers who made these events possible, and for everyone who decided to get together and hack.

Students Learning Hardware Design in Islamabad, Pakistan

The students at LearnOBots took on a slew of great projects during World Create Day like a smart medicine dispenser, electronics that control mains appliances, parking sensors, and a waste bin that encourages you to feed it. The group did a wonderful job of showing off their event by publishing several updates with pictures, stories, and video presentations from all the students. Nice work!

Spend some time with the Hackaday Community in your area this weekend. There are more than 100 community organized meetups happening this Saturday for Hackaday World Create Day. Check the big map for one near you and click the “Join this event” button in the upper right of their events page to let them know you’re coming.

Sticker packs we’ve been sending out to local event organizers.

It’s always a blast to get together with friends new and old to work on a project you’ve been itching to build. Grab something from your work bench and have fun geeking out about it in the company of others. This is a great opportunity to get started on your 2018 Hackaday Prize entry. Brainstorm ideas for a project, get advice on your early build plans, and consider forming a team. Submit what you come up with this Saturday as your entry and improve upon it over the coming weeks.

Can you still sign up to host World Create Day? Of course! Fill out this form and we’ll get you set up right away.

If you simply can’t make it to a live event, you can still take part. Set aside time to hack and show off the stuff you’re working on through social media. We have a Tweetwall set up (great to put up on the projector during group meetups) which shares Tweets with the hashtag #WorldCreateDay.

The Hackaday community from around the world will meetup and spend time building together on Saturday, March 17th. Pick one of those projects you’ve been meaning to dive into and get together with some old and new friends to hack on your projects together.

You should make this day your own. As with any hands-on hacking events it’s a good idea to block out a bit of time at the end for lightning talks to show off the builds everyone has been working on. Make the memories live on past a single day by taking pictures and posting the story of your World Create Day meetup. We enjoyed getting a great look at many of last year’s meetups this way and want to expand the builds we feature on the front page this year.

Meetup Organizers Wanted

Every year we have World Create Day meetups all over the world which are set up by local organizers. Many of those will happen again this year, but we also need you to organize an event in your area. We’ll help you get things set up and put your event up on the big map so others in your area will plan to join in. Do it now, if we get your shipping info early we’ll send you stickers and other swag to hand out at your gathering.

Build Something that Matters

The core of World Create Day is to stop making excuses and just build something. Great builds start with a plan. The Hackaday Prize will begin soon, and since you’re already getting together with other people, form a team and dream up your entry.

This is your take on building something that matters to the world. Come up with a plan that solves a problem facing humanity and publish your work on Hackaday.io. You may be surprised by the support you get for your idea, but you’ll never know until you put an idea out there. Join in Hackaday’s World Create Day on March 17th and let’s show the world the kind of hope that blossoms when we decide to build something that matters.

In the last few weeks, we’ve been seeing a remarkable growth in the entries to The Hackaday Prize. This is due in no small part to World Create Day, a worldwide celebration of building stuff. It’s a worldwide buildathon with hackerspaces all around the globe. Now we’re getting a peek at the results of these gatherings, the videos are posted, and we’re simply gobsmacked by what was created during World Create Day.

Spinal Cord Hacks

The gang over at the Blusson Spinal Cord Center in Vancouver put together a two-day event for World Create Day. The goal of this event was to build a lipsync; a device that enables people with limited use of their hands to use touchscreen devices. It looks like a ray gun, but it’s actually a sip-and-puff device entered into last year’s Hackaday Prize.

Gardening in Cyprus

The Limassol Hackerspace in Cyprus had what is probably the best World Create Day out of all the hackerspaces who took part. Why? Grilled meat, of course.

Instead of trying to improve the entire world, the team at the Limassol hackerspace decided to think locally. Improving their own hackerspace with an automated irrigation system for their vegetable garden, planting vegetables, and building a barbecue took up most of the events of the day. One member even built a few serving platters out of sections of a eucalyptus trunk. These sections of tree cracked, but with the clever application of a CNC router, this hackerspace was able to inlay a few butterflies in the wood. It looks great, and even better with a pile of skewered, grilled meat.

The Osaka Makers’ Space

A few of the members at the Osaka Makers’ Space — like most of us — are interested in miniature robot battles. The first part of the event was, of course, spent tinkering with these tiny robots. A few members of the space made a breakout board for a BLE module, coding it so it could be voice-activated. No, that’s probably not the best way to control a battling robot, but you should do what you want, not what other people think is best.

Also during World Create Day, a few members of the space built three tiny chairs for children. The kids, unfortunately, were busy watching Sesame Street. But hey, at least the screw holes were doweled up. Also on the roster for Osaka’s World Create Day was fixing a broken MacBook Air. The fan quit, and the repair involved soldering wires from the fan to pads on the motherboard.

La Orotava

The folks at the Orotava Hackerspace put on a great event for World Create Day. Wait, where’s Orotava? It’s a town on the island of Tenerife, in the Canary islands. No, the birds are named after the islands, and the islands are named after the dogs.

While they didn’t have hordes of hackers come to a Hackaday meetup on an island in the middle of the Atlantic (St. Helena meetup, anyone?), the Orotava hackerspace did have a few people show up to discuss Hackaday Prize projects. The interesting projects generated from this discussion included an automatic farming robot, mobility problems for mental patients, and a low-cost bandsaw.

A few weeks ago, we took Hackaday IRL and into hackerspaces around the globe. This was World Create Day, a community effort to come together and build something that matters. Think of it as the pre-game for the Hackaday Prize, our online competition to change the world by building hardware. The groups at these hacker meetups have sent in pictures and reported on what they created. What happened during this worldwide hacker meetup? So much awesome stuff.

The SupplyFrame Design Lab

Did you know Hackaday has its own Hackerspace? It’s true! We have an eight-foot ShopBot, a Tormach, we just got a rig to do injection molding, and apparently, the intern is busy setting up a resin printer.

There are a ton of really talented people associated with the Design Lab, and they were out in full force on World Create Day. [Diego] from Deezmaker has been working on robot muscles and customizable linear actuators for a while, so that was obviously the focus of his World Create Day. Everyone needs mirrored LED-equipped welding/steampunk goggles, so that was [Rich Cameron]’s build, pictured to the right.

A fabulous time was had by all, but just because this was only one of three World Create Day meetups hosted ‘officially’ by Hackaday doesn’t mean it was the biggest or the best. There was plenty of fun the world over.

Amritsar, India

World Create Day is a worldwide event, so of course we had a few events in the second most populous country on Earth. [Inderpreet], [Shubham], [Simrat], and [Navjeet] put together a World Create Day event at the Department of Electronics Technology at GNDU Amritsar, their local university. A slew of people showed up, [Inderpreet] gave a talk on The Hackaday Prize, and much fun was had by all.

FabLab San Diego

The Fab Lab in San Diego also hosted a World Create Day event, Projects that made the cut included a real time, IRL closed captioning device. Think of this one as a universal translator, but only one language, with a screen. Or a voice to text thing running on a phone. Either way. Other ideas included an improved mobility cart, an underwater autonomous robot, wireless communication nodes, pressurized algae incubators, and a whole bunch more.

The folks at the San Diego Fab Lab also produced a short video of their World Create Day activities, you can check that out below.